Monday, April 16, 2007

21 32 dead in Virginia Tech shootings

I came to it a little late, but I've just spent the past hour and change watching the news on television. It's enough to have made this agnostic invoke a deity. Several times.

I don't know any more about the VA Tech shootings than anybody else does, which is to day I know nothing, really. Nobody has released the name of the shooter, nobody knows his motive (and it will likely be some time before anybody does). Nobody has answers, yet. We hear nothing.

Unfortunately, what's been going through my head has been the old Boomtown Rats' song, I Don't Like Mondays.

I remember.

It's worse, I think, when you grow up thinking that a school campus is your second home. As a child of a professor, with nearly all my friends being teachers' kids, I want to think that the schools and colleges are safe -- safer than my house. It just isn't so. Aside from the everyday savagery that kids develop and dish out, the large, lethal scale is not a one-time thing. And it isn't just Brenda Ann Spencer, or the boys at Columbine. It has happened repeatedly, over the years, and nothing we can do will prevent it from happening again someday. No matter what we do to try to protect the students and teachers, there is risk in everyday living.

I grieve for every life taken.

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